After his highly criticized Alaska summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin ended without reaching a ceasefire agreement in the war in Ukraine, President Donald Trump now says he thinks it would be “better” if Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met without him.
Speaking Wednesday on “The Mark Levin Show,” Trump made the statement despite claiming to conservative podcaster Mark Levin that he had “very successful” exchanges with both leaders.
“I had a very successful meeting with President Putin. I had a very successful meeting with President Zelenskyy. And now I thought it would be better if they met without me, just to see. I want to see what goes on. You know, they had a hard relationship, very bad, very bad relationship,” Trump said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (left) and U.S. President Donald Trump during a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House on Monday.
Bloomberg via Getty Images
He continued, “And now we’ll see how they do and, if necessary, and it probably would be, but if necessary, I’ll go and I’ll probably be able to get it close.”
Trump went on to say that “they’re in the process of setting it up and we’re gonna see what happens,” adding, “But you gotta stop the killing, Mark, it’s too much killing.”
The president then said, “Nobody from America is being killed” in the war.
“United States soldiers aren’t involved,” he told Levin. “We have no boots on the ground, but when you lose 6,000, 5,000, 7,000 young people, and then you also lose some people from the towns and cities as missiles get lobbed into them, can you imagine living like that?”
Trump, who had a follow-up meeting with Zelenskyy and top European leaders in the Oval Office Monday after Friday’s summit with Putin, made the comments after he announced plans to coordinate a summit between Putin and Zelenskyy in a bid to end the more-than-three-year war in Ukraine.
In a Truth Social post Monday, Trump said he would also plan a trilateral meeting, in which he would take part, as a follow-up to a potential Putin and Zelenskyy meeting.
“At the conclusion of the meetings, I called President Putin, and began the arrangements for a meeting, at a location to be determined, between President Putin and President Zelenskyy,” Trump wrote. “After that meeting takes place, we will have a Trilat, which would be the two Presidents, plus myself.”
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Listen to Trump’s appearance on “The Mark Levin Show” on YouTube.